The SAUDI brigades in Washington

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The Saudis have some very high-priced and rather secretive operatives in Washington, along with their collection of top-dollar “escort” girls. Then they have at the lower end a bunch of groups and persons they doll out money and trinkets to in order to keep them in line and on the team. It’s a little collection that few outside their own very limited circles in Washington pay much attention to some thirty years after Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar helped set them all up: NCUSAR, CNI, WRMEA, IRmep among them. What they have in common, besides incestuously giving awards to each other, is that they carefully refrain from criticizing the Saudis, no matter how badly Saudi policies violate their own stated principles.

Take for instance Philip Giraldi’s recent New York Times article. Giraldi, by the way, in CIA retirement took over the unburied carcass of CNI a few years ago after it had totally failed, collapsed, and shut its office doors…but that’s another story.

” The unwillingness of the United States to seriously confront the effects of supporting forces that enforce stability at the cost of democracy ultimately buys friendship with no one, because supporting promoters of strength to repress radicalism largely serves only to empower those same radicals.”

Now if ever there were a definition that Saudi Arabia fits here you have it! But Giraldi along with his colleagues — among them John Duke Antony, Allison Weir, and Grant Smith — make sure never to be critical of the Saudis. This even though the Saudis are now working closely with the Israelis and at the top of the list of those responsible for the terrible death and repression taking place throughout the Middle East from Yemen to Egypt to Bahrain to Syria and beyond…not to mention the extreme growing repression in “The Kingdom” itself.